


it all boils down to how you eat your oreos

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: NCT (Band), Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2018-07-24 18:46:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7519237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sooyoung thinks Ten is a good person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it all boils down to how you eat your oreos

**Author's Note:**

> originally written for [thekpop100](http://thekpop100.livejournal.com) for the prompt "monster".

Ten thinks monsters are the things that hide under children’s beds at night, with twisted, fractured teeth and spidery fingers bleeding out from the shadows. They kept his eyes bloodshot and stinging for years, afraid of waking up to a nightmare.

Sooyoung, though, Sooyoung thinks monsters come disguised in human flesh, walking among the crush of bodies down the street. And in her waking nightmares, they smile and promise one thing, but turn around and do another.

 

 

 

 

 

Sooyoung was probably born from the crossing path of two comets, both hurtling at speeds bordering two hundred ninety-eight miles per second, one miraculously passing before the other to avoid collision. Sooyoung would be something along the lines of the known and proven and undecipherable phenomena. Sooyoung would be that miracle.

Her stoic parents – who’ve taught her how to flinch the first time Ten tries to wrap his arms around her, who look at him disapprovingly when he trips through Korean, trying to explain all Sooyoung means to him – cannot really be her parents, Ten’s reasoned a long time ago. This was somewhere around the time they were driving back from that disastrous first meeting, Sooyoung trying not to cry, gripping the steering wheel so tight her knuckles shone white through the darkness.

“You’re going to grow old with me,” she told him as he lay adjacent to her on his living room floor, too tired to pull out the sleeping mats. Her face was distorting, indecisive between sobbing her lungs out and trying not to let it get to her. Only the shaky lilt in her voice betrayed to Ten that she was really affected at all. “We’re going to have white hair, or you’re going to bald a little, and we’re going to be really old together.”

Ten laughed, arm propped beneath his head tingly and asleep. “Is this because you want to spite your parents, or because you love me that much?”

Sooyoung turned to face him, left cheek flat against the carpet. She looked up for a moment, considering, before answering honest.

“Both.”

 

 

 

 

 

Sooyoung thinks Ten is a good person. Maybe it’s because she’s convinced that good people have to be perfect, and she believes that Ten is the perfect one for her.

“And what about you?” Ten asks, laughing. He did that a lot – found joy in the mundane facts she’d state. Sooyoung liked that he didn’t take things too seriously.

She taps her finger against her chin. “I guess I’m okay. Not great, not horrible.”

Ten hums. “An okay person.” He takes a sip of the milk Sooyoung buys, but never drinks. “I guess I can live with that.”

 

 

 

 

 

Ten did not think he was a good person.

His mind often believed one thing, but his intrinsic train of thought often told him another. You are not kind, he told himself after a co-worker told him otherwise for agreeing to switch shifts. A kind person wouldn’t feel irrational anger or annoyance at that, the same way a kind person wouldn’t feel envy when someone else was praised for things Ten knew he could do as well.

A kind person didn’t tell half-truths sometimes to make themselves look better than how they saw themselves in the mirror (liars, webs of fibs spun between their tongues and teeth, own eyes wary of what was looking back at them), and kind people were often good people. By the logic of conditional statements, this meant that Ten was not one of them.

Taeyong blows a cloud of cigarette smoke into his eyes. They used to be friends, when Ten smoked. Now, they are people who sometimes hang around each other, tolerating one another’s existence. “What are you thinking about?” he asks as Ten studies the ground of the alley behind the store.

Ten laughs, shaking his head. “I quit,” his brain tells his mouth to say when Taeyong offers him a stick.

He doesn’t think about the pack of Marlboros he’s got in his kitchen drawer, hiding beneath a bunch of paper bags so Sooyoung will never find them, unopened.

 

 

 

 

 

Sooyoung falls asleep on the couch, in the middle of paid programming. She has a dream that Ten, smelling like cigarette ash, solemnly sits her down across from him and tells her his name is actually Nine.

 

 

 

 

 

Ten gets home late and puts a blanket over the sleeping Sooyoung. He lays in her bed, bone tired, but restless. At four in the morning, he slips out of the sheets and crawls under the bed, dust sticking to his back, staring at the wooden skeleton of its frame.

In the darkness, Ten wonders if this is how monsters feel.


End file.
